Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  Never mind: Aurore was more determined than ever. As she once wrote, in another context, “I was not a coward, and I could not have been if I tried.”

  She continued to immerse herself in her social circle, and she and Sandeau collaborated on their writing. They received enthusiastic support from Balzac, who would drop by Aurore’s flat from time to time. She later described him fondly as “childlike and great; always envious of trifles and never jealous of true glory; sincere to the point of modesty, proud to the point of braggadocio; trusting himself and others; very generous, very kind, and very crazy.” Other notable men she called her friends included Baudelaire, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Zola, Henry James, and Dumas. (John Ruskin, William Thackeray, and Thomas Carlyle, however, disliked her work intensely.) Later, Flaubert became a lifelong friend and confidant. Their letters were beautiful and mutually consoling. “There you are feeling sad and lonely, you say, and here I am feeling the same way,” Flaubert wrote to her in 1866. “Where do they come from, do you think, these black moods that engulf us like this? They rise like a tide, you feel as if you are drowning and you have to escape somehow. What I do is lie, floating, letting it all wash over me.” In 1876, a few months before she died, Flaubert wrote: “[Y]ou’ve never done me anything but good and I love you most tenderly.”

  At the end of the summer of 1831, Aurore and Jules began work on the bawdy Rose et Blanche, a planned five-volume novel for which they’d secured a publishing contract, and which they’d signed with the joint pseudonym “J. Sand.” (Latouche, who had become a devoted mentor to Aurore, invented the name.) But Aurore ended up doing the bulk of the writing.

  The novel was released to mixed reviews, yet it had moderate success and gave Aurore the confidence to publish entirely on her own. The following year, she published Indiana—a semi-autobiographical novel, and an unapologetic denunciation of marriage that she expected “to please very few people.” Instead, it won international acclaim and became a best seller. An envious Victor Hugo (her rival for the status of France’s best-selling author) called it “the finest novel of manners that has been published in French for twenty years.” The author of this lauded novel was “George Sand,” a name that would not only endure as her nom de plume but serve as her identity for the rest of her life. After completing Indiana, “I was baptized,” she explained. “The [name] I was given, I earned myself, after the event, by my own toil. . . . I do not think anyone has anything to reproach me for.”

  She was amused by the number of reviewers who spoke enthusiastically of “Mr. G. Sand,” but insisted that a woman must have had a hand in refining some of the novel’s more emotional aspects. They were stumped because “the style and discrimination were too virile to be anything but a man’s.”

  In 1832, her romantic relationship with Sandeau collapsed, and just as she was beginning to achieve professional success, she felt increasingly isolated. But in January 1833, she met Marie Dorval, a famous stage actress in her mid-thirties whose presence toppled and intoxicated Sand, and who would become—as she later described it—the one true love of her life. Both women were married (and had other lovers) at the time, but Sand legally separated from her husband in 1835. She pursued Dorval—initially, in the name of “friendship”: “For my part I feel I love you with a heart brought back to life and rejuvenated by you,” Sand wrote to her early on. “If it is a dream, like everything else I have wished for in life, do not steal it from me too quickly. It does me so much good.” Meanwhile, Dorval’s lover at the time, Alfred de Vigny, gave a detailed assessment of his rival: “Her hair is dark and curly and falls freely over her collar, rather like one of Raphael’s angels,” he wrote of Sand. “She has large black eyes, shaped like those of mystics whom one sees in paintings, or in those magnificent Italian portraits. Her face is severe and gives little away, the lower half is unattractive, the mouth ill-shaped. She has no grace of bearing, and her speech is coarse. In her manner of dress, her language, her tone of voice and the audacity of her conversation, she is like a man.” Vigny had good cause to be concerned.

  Sand played a male role in public because doing so offered her a much broader range of experience, and she loved freedom. Elizabeth Barrett Browning affectionately called her “thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man.” She wrote a sonnet, “To George Sand: A Recognition,” in 1844:

  True genius, but true woman! dost deny

  Thy woman’s nature with a manly scorn,

  And break away the gauds and armlets worn

  By weaker women in captivity?

  Ah, vain denial! that revolted cry

  Is sobbed in by a woman’s voice forlorn!—

  Thy woman’s hair, my sister, all unshorn

  Floats back disheveled strength in agony,

  Disproving thy man’s name: and while before

  The world thou burnest in a poet-fire,

  We see thy woman-heart beat evermore

  Through the large flame. Beat purer, heart, and higher,

  Till God unsex thee on the heavenly shore

  Where unincarnate spirits purely aspire!

  Sand was a cigar-chomping rebel who had brazen affairs as she wished, and with whomever she desired. She could practically roll a cigarette with her eyes closed, and she loved to smoke a hookah. She reveled in her own mischief. In one of her novels, Sand boldly suggested that monogamous marriage was an abnormal, unnatural state that deprived men and women of experiencing true sexual pleasure. Her significant lovers included Alfred de Musset, Franz Liszt, and Frédéric Chopin, who reported to his family, “Something about her repels me.” Her decade-long relationship with Chopin ended badly in 1847, when Sand suspected that he had fallen in love with her daughter.

  Even after it became an open secret in literary circles (and a source of malicious gossip) that Aurore Dupin was the notorious George Sand, she continued her transgressive style of dress and behavior, simply because she enjoyed it. She loved the idea of being in disguise. With her trousers, vest, military coat, hat, and tie, “I was the perfect little first-year student,” she recalled in her autobiography. “My clothing made me fearless.” And walking in her solid, sturdy boots was far preferable to the fussy discomfort of women’s shoes: “With those little iron heels, I felt secure on the sidewalks. I flew from one end of Paris to the other.” In her male attire, she was a voyeur, seeing without being seen. “No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one gave me a second thought; I was an atom lost in the immense crowd.”

  At theaters, she sat in the pit, where only men were permitted, and she always pulled off the ruse with ease—“the absence of coquettishness in costume and facial expression warded off any suspicion,” she explained. “I was too poorly dressed and looked too simple—my usual vacant, verging on dumb, look—to attract or compel attention. . . . There is a way of stealing about, everywhere, without turning a head, and of speaking in a low and muted pitch which does not resound like a flute in the ears of those who may hear you. Furthermore, to avoid being noticed as a man, you must already have not been noticed as a woman.”

  In her autobiography, Sand recalled that one of her friends, who was privy to her sartorial secret, began calling her “monsieur” in public. But just as he would get used to addressing her this way, she would appear the following day dressed as a woman, and he couldn’t keep up with the relentless change of costume. Confused by her various corrections, he took to addressing her only as “monsieur” from then on.

  There was a less amusing aspect to dabbling in androgyny: having to deal with the fallout from her marriage. Casimir meticulously kept a log of his (soon to be former) wife’s crimes and misdemeanors—among them, “She writes novels.” Even worse, “Mme D. affecting the manners of a young man, smoking, swearing, dressed as a man and having lost all the feminine graces, has no understanding of money.” Once tolerant and blithe about their marital arrangement, which allowed her to veer off on an independent pa
th, Casimir came to detest the liberty she’d achieved and was disgusted by her “bohemian” lifestyle. She had to enter a nasty and protracted legal battle to end the marriage, and in the end had to divide her fortune with him.

  No matter how messy her personal life became at any given time, she held steady with her writing, producing a staggering number of novels, plays, essays, and other works. She also painted, and she was an astonishingly prolific letter writer; her published correspondence includes more than fifteen thousand letters. Yet she also happily engaged in so-called women’s work—making jam, doing needlework, and immersing herself in her beloved garden. Although she would periodically take stock of “the irregularity of my essentially feminine constitution,” she was never shaken by what she viewed as the mutability of the self. Given the choice between conforming to prevailing customs and doing as she wished, she simply alternated between the two. It was not always easy, yet she was constitutionally incapable of remaining in a fixed state:

  I was not a woman completely like those whom some moralists censure and mock; I had in my soul an enthusiasm for the beautiful, a thirst for the true; and yet I was a woman like others—dependent, nervous, prey to my imagination, childishly susceptible to the emotionalism and anxieties of motherhood. But did these traits have to relegate me to secondary standing in artistic and family life? That being society’s rule, it was still within my power to submit patiently or cheerfully.

  As Sand’s biographer Belinda Jack noted, “[H]er modernity lies less in her feminism or her socialism, and more in her acceptance of loose, even freewheeling ideas about the self. . . . She had strong intuitions about the subconscious and the need to be aware of our inner unthinking, but acutely responsive, selves.”

  To Sand, this was a natural, normal idea. It was far ahead of her time; she worked tirelessly so that others might embrace it. In her autobiography, Sand expressed a desire to achieve societal acceptance not for herself only, but for other women. “I was going along nourishing a dream of male virtue to which women could aspire,” she wrote, “and was constantly examining my soul with a naïve curiosity to find out whether it had the power of such aspirations, and whether uprightness, unselfishness, discretion, perseverance in work—all the strengths, in short, that man attributes exclusively to himself—were actually unavailable to a heart which accepted the concept of them so ardently. . . . I wondered why Montaigne would not have liked and respected me as much as a brother.”

  No less than George Eliot’s future partner, the critic George Henry Lewes, declared in 1842 that Sand was the most remarkable writer of the century. Dostoevsky considered her “one of the most brilliant, the most indomitable, and the most perfect champions.”

  The last years of her life were often filled with sadness, as by then many of her friends and former lovers were dead. But she was one of the most influential and famous women in France, and possessed remarkable serenity after all that she’d endured. Unfortunately, her reputation did not hold up well after her death. Her prodigious output was eclipsed by the shocking, scandalous details of her life. Compared with her contemporaries, she is hardly read today. “The world will know and understand me someday,” Sand once wrote. “But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.” In that regard, she succeeded beyond measure.

  “What a brave man she was,” Turgenev recalled of Sand, “and what a good woman.”

  Her old friend Flaubert, a notorious misanthrope and recluse, outlived her by four years. Of her funeral in 1876, he said: “I cried like an ass.”

  She had a big nose and the face of a withered cabbage

  Chapter 3

  George Eliot & MARIAN EVANS

  Charles Dickens was suspicious. “I have observed what seem to me to be such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now,” he wrote to George Eliot in January 1858. The candid letter was written a year after the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life, a collection of three stories first serialized, anonymously, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Dickens praised their “exquisite truth and delicacy” but was convinced that the writer was a woman. Elizabeth Gaskell, however, insisted that the author was a man named Joseph Liggins of Nuneaton. The Saturday Review, meanwhile, harbored its own suspicions, noting that George Eliot was rumored to be “an assumed name, screening that of some studious clergyman . . . who is the father of a family, of High Church tendencies, and exceedingly fond of children, Greek dramatists and dogs.”

  Not quite: George Eliot was a thirty-eight-year-old woman named Mary Anne (Marian) Evans, a politically progressive atheist raised in a stern, religious household, unmarried, childless, and living openly with a married man. She was a formidable intellectual who had begun educating herself after her mother’s death in 1836 and would publish seven astonishing novels in her lifetime, including The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. How Evans became one of the great Victorian novelists is the story of an eccentric young woman from the Midlands region of England who broke just about every taboo of her time. “She was never content with what was safely known and could be taken for granted,” one critic wrote of her extraordinarily restless life.

  Born on November 22, 1819, in Warwickshire, she was her parents’ third child, following the birth of a daughter and a son. (Her father, Robert, also had two children from a previous marriage; his first wife died.) The birth of a second daughter was terribly disappointing. Sons were valued and valuable; girls, until married off, were a financial drain and nothing but a burden on the family. Mary Anne was no great prize. Twin boys arrived fourteen months later, but they died soon after birth, and Mary Anne’s mother, Christiana, never recovered from the loss. She made no effort to hide that fact from her daughter.

  Mary Anne eventually dropped the “e” from “Anne” and later changed her name to Marian, but at the end of her life, she reverted to “Mary Ann.” (That’s why, in biographies, you’ll find her first name spelled with confusing variation: what to call her?) Since she lived with a mother who never doted on her, her childhood was marked by isolation and sadness. Luckily, her father was kinder, and gave her a copy of her very first book: The Linnet’s Life. But whatever bond she shared with him, it was never enough to replace the maternal affection she was denied.

  Unkempt, frequently melancholy, and extremely sensitive, she was an unsightly irritant to Christiana, who may have blamed her own poor health and depression on having given birth to Mary Anne. The Evanses’ youngest child was obstinate, fearful, and given to emotional outbursts. At the age of five, in 1824, she was sent to a boarding school. A few years later, her parents would move her to another boarding school, where Mary Anne became close to a teacher named Maria Lewis. Even for the Victorian era, five was quite young to be shipped away for one’s education, though she did come home on weekends. A timid and socially awkward student, Mary Anne would eventually find academic success and earn the admiration of her peers, but her insecurity lingered and she was always harshly critical of her own achievements.

  At seven, Mary Anne began reading Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley. This event marked the first hint of her future vocation: when the book was returned to a neighbor before she’d had a chance to finish reading it, she was terribly upset. She did the next best thing by writing out an ending herself.

  When she was twelve, Mary Anne attended a girls’ school in the Midlands run by evangelical sisters. She excelled there, impressing her teachers with her mastery of every subject, especially literature. She received a novel in the mail from her beloved former teacher Maria Lewis, and sent a thank-you letter back, describing the sustaining role that books had played in her life. “When I was quite a little child I could not be satisfied with the things around me,” she wrote. “I was constantly living in a world of my own creation, and was quite contented to have no companions that I might be left to my own musin
gs and imagine scenes in which I was chief actress.” It was Lewis, in 1839, who encouraged Mary Anne to submit her work for publication. The poem, her print debut, was signed “M.A.E.” and appeared in the Christian Observer. It began:

  As o’er the fields by evening’s light I stray,

  I hear a still small whisper—come away;

  Thou must to this bright, lovely world soon say

  Farewell!

  The effects of her feeling of estrangement from those around her—and dealing with her mother’s death, when she was seventeen years old—would lead her to be perpetually in search of mother figures and to form fierce attachments to the people she loved—including her brother Isaac. (Their close yet complex bond informed the sibling relationship of Maggie and Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss.) She was desperate for intimacy, a longing that never left her. “Before I had your kind letter,” she wrote to a friend in 1842, “one of the ravens that hovered over me in my Saul-like visitations was the idea that you did not love me well enough to bestow any time on me more than what I had already robbed you of, but that same letter was a David’s harp that quite charmed away this naughty imagination.” (By this time, too, she had begun spelling her name Mary Ann.)